To Try Men's Souls
by EllieMurasaki
Summary: Sam plus Jess made two. Sam plus Dean, twice the square root of two. Sam and...that doesn't bear thinking about. 5x03 Free To Be You And Me coda.


Sam doesn't do well on his own. There was always Dean.

Then there was Stanford, where Sam floundered hopelessly for a week until his roommate mentioned a deep and abiding loathing for Stephen King, and then there was Sam and Zach. And then Sam and Zach and Becky, and then Becky's friends and Zach's, which to all appearances added up to half the undergraduates at Stanford. Okay, part of it might be that somebody his size is hard to lose in a crowd, but there were certainly enough people Sam could count as friends that he never had to be alone. But mostly it was Sam and Zach and Becky.

Then Sam walked into an art history class—distribution requirements, what could he do—and this hot blonde chick sat down next to him and pulled her nose out of Diana Tregarde and introduced herself, and that was that right then. Sam and Jess, Jess and Sam. One plus one is two.

Then Dean came back, and everything clicked into place in Jericho in a way it had sometimes when Sam forgot to hate the hunting life. One plus one is two. But the price of having his brother was losing his friends, and Sam and Jess and Becky and Zach were four, and Sam meant to keep that.

(Jess would have liked Dean.)

And then the desperate search on through the never for Dad and for Jessica's killer (_I hunt, therefore I am_), and somewhere along the line they shifted from Sam and Dean, one plus one is two, to SamnDean. A single unit. Take the square root to separate them, add one point four one to one point four one, and the answer is nearly three. The two of them together are just that awesome.

But the synergy bonus only applies when they're working together, when they have the same goal in mind. They lost some of it between Cold Oak and Wyoming, when Dean set himself on a path Sam couldn't let him follow, and the irony of it is that Dean could have survived Sam's death a lot better if they weren't so awesome together. And the irony of _that_...but Sam shies away from that thought, because it was Ruby's presence that kept him from falling apart while Dean was in hell, and Dean's presence that glued him back together after hell and Broward County both (_trust you gave, a child to save, left you cold and him in grave_), and it's only been a week since he saw Dean and he's been hearing the broken ceramic of his bones scrape against itself for six point eight days of it.

It doesn't help that Lindsey has decided he's a man of mystery and she's going to solve him. (_Hush little baby, don't say a word, never mind that noise you heard, it's just the beasts under your bed, in your closet, in your head..._) Or that she looks like Lilith at the convent. Or like Ruby used to. Becky. Jess.

She only said exactly what he's been thinking. Dean's out there somewhere, cheerfully belting out "Wherever I May Roam", and Sam's right here, remembering when Sam plus Ruby equaled _bright is the moon high in starlight, chill in the air cold as steel tonight_, hearing only _never free, never me, so I dub thee unforgiven_. And then she turned into Lucifer—she was Lucifer all along—and he's singing _I'm your life, I'm the one who cares, they betray, I'm forever there, you're my mask, you're my cover, my shelter_ and fuck it. Just. _Fuck_ it. If Sam ever gets the chance he is stealing that tape from Dean and smashing it like he did the one with "Highway to Hell".

If his mental iPod must be stuck on that album, his theme song is fucking well going to be "Don't Tread On Me".

But what does he actually _have _that he can use against Lucifer?

That Lucifer's an angel and Lucifer needs a consenting vessel. But judging from the stunt Zachariah pulled, angels define 'consent' in a way that would send Jess and Becky into a two-part harmony rant on rape culture. Zachariah has nothing on Alastair, Sam's pretty sure, so Dean can hold out for a good long while, but if Dean's capable of breaking, what chance does Sam have? So really that only buys them time until Sam gives in, and meanwhile the world gets smashed to bits around them.

That Dean's Michael's intended vessel. That has promise, in that Dean is still under orders to save Sam or kill him, in that Dean hasn't explicitly broken his promise to Sam to follow that order. (Implicitly, oh hell yes, but there are reasons Sam meant to go to law school. Most of them boiled down to wanting to keep saving people and putting bad guys out of commission, as demonstrated by his plan to become a prosecutor, but factored into his long-term plans had been that Sam would have been one hell of a lawyer.) But if Sam caves and Dean doesn't, the world still gets smashed to bits, only in this scenario Sam's complicit in the way he was with Meg, raised an order of magnitude because demons don't actually need consent, and he'd rather be complicit in the way he is now. Sin of commission, sin of omission, not that there's a difference in the end because either way he's failing to stop it.

If Dean caves and Sam doesn't—ha—then they're back at Lucifer's promise to resurrect Sam. Whose life would have been infinitely simpler from infancy if dead shit stayed dead.

Sam thinks about calling Castiel and asking if Jimmy's awake in there, if it's possible that Jimmy has a shot at affecting Castiel's behavior the way it's demonstrably possible for demon-possessed people to. Because if that's the case, he can call Dean and they can both lie back and think of England and Sam can keep a lid on Lucifer long enough for Deanmichael to kill Lucifer—probably best accomplished, because Sam isn't convinced that Dean has gotten over preferring himself dead to Sam dead, by arranging it so that Samlucifer and Deanmichael kill each other—and then they can be _done_.

Sam wants, so badly, to be _done_. To be no one, nothing, zero.

To have what he lost. To be the square root of two.

Better not let Lucifer hear that thought. That's the whole reason Lucifer wants Sam; even when Sam and Dean were SamnDean, they weren't as close as Sam and Lucifer could be.


End file.
